A co-location facility provider (a “provider”) may employ a communication facility, such as a data center or warehouse, in which multiple customers of the provider locate network, server, and storage gear and interconnect to a variety of telecommunications, cloud, and other network service provider(s) with a minimum of cost and complexity. By using co-location facilities of the provider, customers of the provider including telecommunications providers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), application service providers, service providers, content providers, and other providers, as well as enterprises, enjoy high flexibility, less interconnection latency, and therefore can focus on their core business.
Cloud computing refers to the use of dynamically scalable computing resources, storage resources etc., accessible via a network, such as the Internet. Computing resources, often referred to as a “cloud,” provide one or more services to customers. These services may be categorized according to service types, which may include for examples, applications/software, platforms, infrastructure, virtualization, and servers and data storage. The names of service types are often prepended to the phrase “as-a-Service” such that the delivery of applications/software and infrastructure, as examples, may be referred to as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), respectively.
The term “cloud-based services” or, more simply, “services” refers not only to services provided by a cloud, but also to a form of service provisioning in which customers contract with service providers for the online delivery of services provided by the cloud. Service providers manage a public, private, or hybrid cloud to facilitate the online delivery of services to one or more customers. In some instances, multiple customers and service providers may have physical and/or logical network interconnections at co-location facility points that provide for high-speed transmission of information between the customers and service providers. The co-location facility may in such instances be alternatively referred to as an “interconnection facility.”